She claims me to be filthy

She claims me to be filthy. Words like hers cut through flesh and bone and then follows through by grinding straight down to blood and stone. Struck blind by calligraphy-stillness, radiant concentration evaporates from her mouth, quivering monotheistically. Believe,she says, as she claims me to be filthy. Words rising from the gutter, reaching straight into the sun, fragrant dew settles cold-like and still on my forehead as I find myself labouring under the unaltered presumption of guilt. Crawling, creeping, yearning, the ooze of condemnation and damnation creeps in, closer now, closer still, towards the end. She says that I am filthy, clinging wildly to aerial telepathy; weird, unplugged daytime television psychopathy. Myriads of canned laughter and fragile upbeat hysteria, a cacophony of ravaging screeches. Her words are words, and so truth is spoken: hammer down, beat by beat, sledgehammer, cold whammer, straight to the slammer. Hoho. Bam. Bam. Muscles ache, mind melt, then break out into frantic spasms; odd feverish sacrificial rituals unfold behind my closed eyes. Assisted in her words and deeds by frenzied media outlets building up undefined ferocity in public eyes, bloodshot and close to catatonic. She claims me to be filthy.

She claims me to be guilty. Never have I ever heard words with such incredible power. Unbelievable, downright inconceivable in their unchallenged might! Her malignant madness made manifest through her manic, mischievous magicians words, would see all and one bow down and accept her unfounded words as absolute truth. No doubt. No need to pause and consider. No doubt. Wondrous world, how sweet thou art. How innocent and flowerlike, how like a willow whipped by the wind. How her delicate petals have whilted. Should I compare thee to a… long fingernails like claws dug deep into my brain, escaping yet the clutches of paranoid delusion, but only just. Grasping, no, clinging to a juvenile past of forgotten fancies, flushed down the drain and drawn exhaustively from the dying of the light. A ferocious claim of bygone guilt dragged up from the deep recesses of time immemorial. A past galloping, passing by, bygone days, forgotten eras of the here-and-now where here-and-now mattered and clumsy teen angst passed as charmed offense, given, not taken. Memories fail, come time. She claims me to be guilty.

Frightened and whipped mercilessly in the town square for all to see, I float away on the certainty of my innocence. Strange discourse, strange words, stranger sentences still grip my throat, squeezing, squeezing, choking. I have become unknown, undecided, unwanted, leper-like and shunned. Smell of print and tabloid-press, absurd unproven claims demand the headlines, claim the discourse, claim the papers printed on demand to feed the raging manic mobs, the hate, the smug selfrighteousness of society gripped by moral outrage, clinging to aerial telepathy, the psychic insights told it so: «He is guilty». There, in the spotlights: my name and face plastered on every wall in a wide world where there are only ever walls, to bash ones head against. Ready for judgements harsh, unthinking, unblinking. She claims me to be guilty. And so we feed the wolves, throw my name to the beasts and see them tear it limb from limb in bloodsports historical and histrionic. Enter the arena, enter the gladiators. We who are about to die, salute you… No trial, no verdict. Guilty by guilt assumed and by gender made. Guilty by nothing but her transcendent magicians words and squirmy, snakelike form, presented in drooling tear-like manners; woe is me. Goddamn, goddamn, where did it all go? Strung up in trees and lynched by frenzied pitchfork wielding maniacs unable to complete basic sentences due to their bloodlust-roars interrupting their anxious mental processes. «YOU UNCULTURED SWINE!» Anger feeds the hordes, anger selfrighteous and dubious at best. Enter barbarian hordes at mid-level societes forlorn and lost in the fight to do perceived right, to fulfill the need for perceived justice. Forgetting, in the heat of the fragmented moment of untettered lunacy, the undeniable rights of the accused. To be kept anonymous, to be considered innocent until proven otherwise. To be awarded basic humanity, a shred of common decency. Frightened now, so frightened. Be subservient. Be calm. Be focused. Don`t lose your cool. Don`t lose your… anything. Stay calm, collected, concentrated. Anything can be used against you, will be used against you, will become a knife to slit your throat with. Your own anger is immaterial when measured against the furious anger of the unquestioning and unquestioned hordes. You have no right to be angry, get upset, show emotion of any kind. Emotion is their right, not yours. Float away on hollow prayers and drowning wishes, spreadeagled and crucified long before truth and justice done and potential sentence served. And yet, and yet, I am innocent. I claim. I know. Might as well piss my words into the wishy-washy wind of the abysmal void. The court of public opinion deemed it so: guilty. Looming over me, shadows and blood, dust and bones. `cause the presses told it so, presented it so. No anonymity, no safetynet, no nothing. They claim me to be guilty.

They claim me to be guilty. Hungry wolves unleashed. Fangs glinting in the light of this eternal wolves moon. Howling outside my doors, the choir infernal towards damnation calls. Hoofprints in the snow. Drooling madness and calls for punishment, calls for my head, detained, then smashed, then destroyed. Trample, trample, skull and bones, death and destruction, assassination of character, of personhood and humanity. I have become none, have become noone, have become persona non grata ungratified. Still on the wind: laughtracks galore. Canned laughter turning to spinechilling howls. An entire world told what to think by biased presentations, even now clinging to aerial telepathy. Over and over. On and on. Do not presume, for one moment, that you will be allowed anonymity. Do not assume, for one moment, that you will be considered innocent until proven otherwise. The blood seeps into the ground, the wolves lap it up, then pray for more, more, even more. And here we go, rollercoaster rides, the signalling come, the virtue done, holier than thou and clean, on earth as it is in heaven. So clean, so clean as to be elevated to sainthood and later godhood. They know me to be guilty long before a trial, long before a sentence, long before I get to present my case. Barricade the doors, shut the windows, close the curtains, dim all lights, disappear, do not appear, do not call out for them to hear. They will not listen. They will not see. They refuse. You will not speak. They refuse. The world is faulty calamity, weird whines and howls. In the heat of the moment, at the pitch of the note, we forgot due process, the presumption of innocence, the right to not be locked in the laughing stock and pelted with rotten fruit. At the turning of the page, we forgot to think and so we skipped three pages, or more, glued together by drool and righteous dribble. Jumping straight to the conclusion, no further evidence needed, your honour. Filthy, guilty. And yet, there we go and here we are: there is no sense of right no more, merely justice legionaire, plentiful, hysterical. My name is broken, ruined, raptured, ravaged, long before any reason came out to play in gardens green and lush. My bones are fractured, eyes gouged out and tongue ripped out of my mouth by thongs burning with the flame of maladjusted societal upheaval. She claims. And so it must be true. No bouncing back, no coming back. Life is ended, done and dusted. `cause she claims me to be filthy, and they claim me to be guilty. The courts of public opinion, driven by the whips of their ascended god-emperor mediamasters, decadent and above criticism, have deemed me guilty and thusly raped my name with barbwire-dildos cut from treelike cacti.

Bedridden. Anxious. Shaking. I think I`ve lost weight. Haven`t slept for eighteen months. Colder than hell. The walls are closing in. Her words still ring through loudspeakers, maniac presence, crazy eyes and doctored voice. Still there, in waking, still there in sleeping. The circle is closing in. There is no escape. There is nothing left. She claims me to be guilty, fatigued, drained of colour and drained of love and life and love for life. My name still howled at the coming of the harvest moon. Drag me to the altar, drive the knife into my heart. No matter to go, no where to go, now where to go? This endless loop, a M.C. Escher drawing of a hangmans noose. The wild and weird and wacky adventures of evidence unseen. Somehow hidden, somehow forgotten, somehow not considered. I cling to warm memories, the ebb and tide of time and life. Lost. Just another lost boy. Old lost boy. Aerial telepathy. Seeing mouths move, hearing noises, weird guttural groans in lew of words. Understanding nothing. Babble, rabble, dust and cobwebs. Babble, rabble, claims and snakes. Arms and legs shackled. Stuck to the floor – Words flow, words shine, words trickle down and trickle up. Holy hell; what a circus, what a grandiose display of power unmoved, untouched, unquenchable, unchallenged! What a gigantic farce. And still, she claims me to be filthy, guilty. They claim me to be guilty, filthy. Crime. Punishment. Meet our demands. Bring us our sacrifice. All meaning is lost in the vortex. Longing for justice, but what kind? Mob justice. No other kind.

Here we go. Courts in session. One, two, three, four. Come at me. Coming at me. Skull smashed. Coming at me still. Eyes droopy, gaze unfocused. Bags under my eyes. Aged seventeen years in a week. Wasting away. Skin gone pale, translucent even. I`ve turned into a shadow and a shade, a whisper on the wind. Have become unseen, unheard, invisible. Evidence presented, evidence without question. No doubt. No guilt. Beyond the wildest shadow of a doubt: there is no guilt. There is no truth to this, that I am filthy, nor that I am guilty. There is nothing further to be said, nothing more that needs to be said. Free to go. They deem me to be clean, they deem me to be innocent. Cleared of any and all charges. Leave this room. Hammer down. Hammer down. Echoing, reverbarating through my body, shining through my bones and aching muscles. Uplifted. Elevated. Ascended. Clean, clean and so free, free! Laughter forms, but turns to weeping. Cold body, hands, arms, feet, legs, cold and numb. Feeling elated. Grand. I am cleared. My name is cleared. I claim her to be filthy. I claim her to be guilty. Justice shall be served.

They claim me to be guilty still. They nail themselves to the selfsame aerial telepathy, unaccepting of the unaltered truth. Once a victim; once a sacrifice. This never changes. Life is over still, even when I am cleared and the slate whiped clean. There is no doubt, no doubt at all. My evidence to the contrary of her claims where perfect, flawless, diamond-like and vibrant. She lied. She lies still. In the back of my head, a mass of filth, cancerous and gibbering, spreads. As it does through the pack, a pack of wild wolves still howling for blood beneath the harvest moon. They claim me to be guilty still, and I will never be completely clean. She claims me to be filthy still, and remains never to be guilty herself. Justice will never be served in the grim and stonefaced apocalypse of life no longer lived. They claim me to be guilty. They have all but killed me.